This script is an ugly mongrel hack, but that is what you get when an aged script kiddie writes something in a hurry. The right way to do it would be to parse Latitude’s JSON output cleanly using the Perl library. But that dirty prototype took me all of ten minutes to set up while unwinding between meetings, and it now works fine in my crontab.

The main limitation of this script is that your Google Public Location Badge has to be enabled and it has to show the best available location. This means that for this script to work, your location has to be public. The privacy conscious among my readers will surely love it !

Meanwhile, grab the code for latitude2brightkite.sh, put it in your crontab and have more fun with Brightkite and Google Latitude… To me, this is what both services were missing to become truly usable.

Of course, doing it with “XEP-0080 – User Location” via publish-subscribe (“XEP-0080 – PubSub” would make much more sense than polling an HTTP server all the time, but we are not there yet. Meanwhile this script could be made more intelligent by only checking in with Brightkite if the Google Latitude position has changed. I’ll think about it for the next version…

One of the benefits of running blogs is the ability to gather traffic statistics and spot emerging trends. The popularity of an article is an interesting information, but my favorite is the key phrases in search engine referrer URL. The key phrases tell us what people were looking for when they ended up on the site.

I had personal and anecdotal data about the flood of obnoxious simplistic Facebook personality tests, but now I have numbers to back it up.

I predict a bright future for the One-Click Quiz Blocker Facebook application : it is the easiest way to make the newsfeed clean and useful again. It does what it says – it just works and it takes just one click : a real pleasure compared to my former obsessive-compulsive habit of systematic manual blocking (about five hundreds in three years…).

The PGP web of trust is no longer the only application that supports a social graph. With the recent mainstream explosion of social networking and digital identity applications, there is an embarrassing wealth of choices such as Google’s OpenSocial specificationhat propose a common set of API for social applications across multiple sites. Social networking in a web environment, including all forms of publication such as blogging, microblogging, forums and anything else that support links is a way to build digital identity. Each person that follows your updates or links to your articles is in effect vouching for the authenticity of your personae, and each one who adds you as a “friend” on a social network is an even stronger vote toward the authenticity of your profile, even if some people add any comer as their “friend”.

The vetting process in social networking applications is in effect just as good as the average key signing outside of a proper key signing process : some will actually check who they are vetting, others will happily sign anything – and it does not matter too much because the whole point of the web of trust is to handle a continuous fabric whose nodes have different reputations and no guarantee of reliability. The result is a weak form of pseudonymous web of trust – just like the PGP web of trust. But with an untrusted technological infrastructure, it is only about strong enough for common social use.

An anaemic GPG web of trust and thriving social networking applications are obvious matches. So what about a social networking application that handles the PGP web of trust ? As usual, similar inputs through similar individuals generate similar outputs – the same problems with the same environment and the same tools handled by people who share backgrounds produce the same conclusions. So now that I am trawling search engines about that concept I find that I am not the only one to hav thought about it. Who will be the first to develop a social networking application plug-in that links a profile to a GPG key to facilitate and encourage key signing between members of the same platform that know each other ?

Chat is supposed to be realtime conversation – and it often is. But just as some corporate victims live in Outlook (that abortion that Microsoft shoves down user’s throat as an excuse for a mail client) some fellow geeks live with an IRC screen at hand. Those people useIRC for realtime conversation, but not only. Soliloquy is widespread, and having a client with at least half a dozen tabs that are as many parallel conversations is a common occurence. IRC users weremicroblogging before the term was coined and web interfaces imagined.

People come to IRC channels such as project channels to meet the whole group. But just as often they come there to hang out with acquaintances, which they find spread accross various channels. Wouldn’t it be great if each user could have his own channel with just his friends ? This is what microblogging is : a people aggregator, just as any feed aggregator but for the people you want to follow.

I have had a hard time so far trying to convince my IRC addicted friends that we should use a Jabber MUC chat room in lieu of our usual IRC channel. Jabber MUC is superior to IRC in every way possible, but as much as we like to rail against the common user’s inertia to technological adoption, we are sometimes no better.

I believe that the problem was that Jabber MUC provides only marginal incremental improvement to their usage. And adopting a microblogging service is a huge stretch from their current use cases. I have therefore long been dreaming about a chat interface to microblogging that would meld the social power of microblogging and common chat usage patterns into a workable migration path for my IRC addicted friends. And there it is :

From a user’s point of view, Identichat is about joining the Jabber multi-user chat at your_identica_user_name@identichat.prosody.im and you’ll immediately find yourself in a standard MUC room where the participants are your Identi.ca subscribers. The conversation is the microblogging stream that you would normally get at Identi.ca.

If you try to enter a notice, a help message in the chat window points out that ‘You can register using your identica account by sending !register username password’. Do that – not ‘/register’ as I mistakenly typed out of IRC habit – and you are set to use Identi.ca as any chat tool.

Identichat will help Laconica by eroding chat user’s resistance to change. And it could also foster new uses of microblogging as a thick client enables considerably accelerated interaction compared to a web interface. For now it could be faster – the turnaround latency is perceptible compared to IRC or XMPP MUC, and a helpful “line too long” message would be better than “Send failed : error 406”. But I’m nitpicking : Identichat is a wonderful tool that gives new faces to the microblogging infrastructure. An infrastructure that can show different faces to different classes of users has a great future !

It’s hard to maintain the illusion that you’re particularly special, talented and original when, with a quick Google of whatever genius idea you’ve come up with, you see that 3 billion people have already thought that, done that, analyzed that, criticized that, indexed the history of that in Wikipedia and made a fortune on that… In 1995.

So now, to really live up to our parents’ and teachers’ praise, we have to work a lot harder, be a lot smarter and know that we’re competing with all of those other 3 billion people who think like us and have already started to act on the kind of ideas and “talent” we have.

Actually it was always like that, but slower and invisible. Original ideas are few because similar inputs through similar individuals generate similar outputs – the same problems with the same environment and the same tools handled by people who share backgrounds produce the same conclusions. So it is not surprising that concepts are invented simultaneously and reinvented all the time. I don’t feel belittled by finding out that I’m not unique – on the contrary : I feel empowered by finding that I’m not isolated anymore. I remember lounging in libraries in my youth, reading esoteric technical books chosen at random. I often resented not being able to share that with people who have similar interests. Now we can find each other easily and all be surfing together at the wavefront. Childhood dreams came true – life is good !

But if you anguish about being a unique snowflake just like all the other unique snowflakes, there is still hope for you. Our mental agility and cultural maleability suffer from a rather heavy inertia, so the processing stage is not readily manipulable. That leaves only the input to be tinkered with in the short term – and you can play with inputs a lot ! This is why it is important to cultivate diversity in your social network, and it is also why adding some noise into your web feeds is good for you. Who is not addicted to new stimuli ?

Google Trend reports that the country where Google searches for the word “friendfeed” most frequently originate is Iran. Is FriendFeed very popular in Iran ? Can anyone explain that surprising piece of data ? I stumbled upon it today and it puzzled me enough to warrant some more research.

Givent that the queries originate mostly in Iran – by a wide margin, it is strange that the most used languages for those searches is English, because Google does have its user interface translater in Persian. A similar phenomenon does not appear for Facebook : there is apparently quite a craze about Facebook in Turkey, and the most used languages in those searches is therefore Turkish.

Proportionally to population and Internet usage penetration, that is quite a large proportion of FriendFeed users in Iran.

But the Alexa data for Facebook does not match the Google Trends result : it does not even mention Turkey in the top countries of origin – the USA are first, followed by a bunch of western countries.

We could have the following conclusions :

Myspace is a mostly American site

Turkish are curious about Facebook but actually use Friendfeed

Iran are not only curious about Friendfeed but also use it like crazy

Is Robert Scoble secretly dealing with the Pasdaran ? Is there a character set issue that screws up the whole statistics because we are ISO-8859-1 biased ? I have no idea, but I have a feeling that I have barely scratched the surface of the issue and there are certainly plenty of unexpected findings to be discovered about who is using which social site.

Have you tried one more time to convince you parents to switch to web feeds to get updates from the family ? Do you cringe when you see your colleague clumsily wade through a collections of sites main pages instead of having them aggregated in a single feed ? Or did your technophobe girlfriend miss the latest photo album you posted ? With a wide variety of source acknowledging that web feeds ans web feeds readers being perceived as too technical, many of us have scaled back this particular evangelization effort to focus it on users ripe for transitionning from basic to advanced tools.

Breaking through that resistance outright is beyond our power, but we can get around it. Electronic mail is a mature tool with well understood use cases with which even the least competent users feels comfortable thanks to how easily it maps with the deeply assimilated physical mail model. This is why Louis Gray has started mailing Google Reader items to promote the use of that web feed reader. But we can do better than that by building a fully automated bridge from web feed to email.

Our hope for plugging the late adopters into the information feeds is named rss2email. As its name suggests, Aaron Swartz’s GPL-licensed rss2email utility converts RSS subscriptions into email messages and sends them to whatever address you specify. Despite the name, it handles Atom feeds as well, so you should be able to use it with just about any feed you like. And of course rss2email is available from Debian.

The nice introduction to rss2email by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier is all the documentation you need – and rss2email is so simple that you probably don’t even need that. I now have some of my favorite late adopters each plugged into his custom subset of my regular information distribution feeds. The relevant news stories get mailed to them without me having to even think about it. And the best part is that they now read them !

I have become a user of Brightkite, a service that provides situational awareness in the geographical context. Once its relationship to user location information sources such as Fire Eagle improve, it may become a very nice tool, especially in mobile use cases where location reporting may be partly automated.

But even if they add technical value in the growing world of geographically aware applications, theses services are actually not innovative at the functional level. For example, in the ham radio universe, APRS is already a great system for real time tactical digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area – which includes among other things the position of the participating stations. And there is also TCAS, which interrogates surrounding aircrafts about their positions, and AIS which broadcasts ship positions and enables the entertaining Vessel Traffic Services such as the one provided by MarineTraffic. All these radio based systems broadcast in the clear and are not satisfying the privacy requirements of a personal eventing service. But that problem has also been solved by the Blue Force Tracker which even though it is still a work in progress has already changed how a chaotic battlefield is perceived by its participants.

“Where am I, and where are my friends ?” is not only the soldier’s critical information – it is also an important component of our social lives, witness the thriving landscape of geosocial networking. Geographic location is a fundamental enabler : we are physically embodied and the perimeter of location based services actually encompasses anything concerning our physical presence. So we can’t let physical location services escape our control. Fire Eagle may be practical for now, but we need to make geographical information part of the basic infrastructure under our control and available on a standardized, open and decentralized basis. The good news is that much thoughts have already been invested into that problem.

Physical location is part of our presence, and as you may have guessed by now, this means XMPP comes to the rescue ! We have XEP-0080 – User Location, an XMPP extension which is currently a XMPP Foundation Draft Standard (implementations are encouraged and the protocol is appropriate for deployment in production systems, but some changes to the protocol are possible before it becomes a Final Standard – as good as a draft standard RFC and therefore good enough for early adopter use). It is meant to be communicated and transported by means of Publish-Subscribe or the subset thereof specified in Personal Eventing via Pubsub. It may also be provided as an extension of plain vanilla <presence/> but that is quite a crude way to do it compared to the Publish-Subscribe goodness.

Some people notice I am quite dogmatic about open networks. And they are right : to me, open is everything and the rest is details. But even my zeal has its limits : I don’t gratuitously shove tools in the face of people who can’t use them in practical conditions. I have been advocating jabber among my technically minded friends since 2001 and running my own server since 2003, but it took Google joining the XMPP network in 2006 to actually make it a viable option for pushing open instant messaging to the masses of people I don’t want to support myself. Before that I could understand the necessity for joining proprietary networks and run multiprotocol clients to reach people I could not decently drag to Jabber or IRC. But now I can tell them that getting presence information and instant messenging from me is just a Google account away – and since it is a mainstream service offered by an established and well known service provider they can hardly anymore label me a techno-excentric for using it. So – no I will not join your proprietary instant messaging network.

To me there is an element of religion in those choices. But the techno-apathetic average user can make the same choices out of pure self-interest. If there are a number of comparable offerings on the market, one of which lets the buyer choose between different suppliers and move between them at will, you can bet that the one-time cost of moving away from the proprietary offering will be more than offset by the future value of the open solution. If we look at the history of technologies, examples of such migrations are plenty. Let’s just take e-mail for example : what is the current weight of closed mail systems ? They still exist, but they are insignificant niches and many of them use e-mail for notification…

With the profusion of tools, our online presence is all over the place… Here is a quick tour of where fragments of me can be found. I’m focusing on tools – I won’t list mere static pages (of which I still have a few dusty instances in various aging places). The goal of this article is to draw a quick taxonomy of the tools I’m using.

Not only is this list not exhaustive, but I have not even bothered to count the forums and blogs where I lurk or contribute comments. Don’t think that I’m a normal user though : maintaining a watch over online tools is part of my trade, so I’m the sort of person who’ll create an account on every site in sight if just to take a look at it.

But with mainstream users comes much cluelessness. Those are the people who mindlessly click the default option on every pop-up dialog in sight and then bring you malware ridden computers for healing while wondering why it is so slow and whether they should buy a new one – all they get from me nowadays is a kind word, an Ubuntu CD and offer to install it. Those users have shown time and time again how the path of least social resistance leads to a torrent of application spam.

Some applications such as are a useful addition to the social framework – among them I particularly like Friend Wheel. Many other are just games or even purely decorative trinkets but they should not be dismissed offhand: they have an important role in evangelizing social tools and in promoting use, and they have the social role of fostering playful interaction that reinforces social links. But if you look below, you’ll probably conclude that the quantity of shiny fluff is a tad overwhelming – this is the list of applications that my Facebook account blocks… And it was gathered in less than two years of activity !

Absolut Vodka

Addicted to NCIS

Addicted to Two and a Half Men

A la Antillean

Alice Blind Test

Amazing Wishlist

Animated GIFTS

A quel(le) star ressembles-tu le plus physiquement?

A quel X-Men ressembles tu ?

AREPAS and Venezuelan Food

Are you a great lover ?

Are You Lucky?

Are you Moroccan?

Are you romantic?

Art

ATTACK!

aWizard

Bathroom Wall

Be a Billionaire!

Because You’re Special

Become Rambo

Best Friend Contest

Best Match!

Best Wishes

Birthday Alert

Birthday Calendar

Birthday Cards

Blackjack

Bless You

Blow A Kiss

Books iRead

Booze Mail

Borat / Ali G Photos, Quotes and Trivia

Bowling Buddies

BrainFall.com Quiz Results

BrewSocial

Bubble Town

Bumper Sticker

Bumper Stickers [Photo Gifts]

Call Me on Skype

Card for Africa

Car IQ

Cat Breed Collection

Causes

Chanel Gifts ?

Characteristics

Check Your Dudeness

Chinese Horoscope

Circle of Friends

COMINGSOON

Comment finirez vous ?

Comment s’appellera l’homme de ta vie ?

Comparaison

Compare People

Coolest Friends

Coolest Person Contest

Crushes

Cute vs Sexy

Define Me

Delux Christmas Tree

Denzel Washington

De quel arrondissement parisien ètes-vous ?

Do people secretly hate you?

Drunk Survey

ePresident

Es-tu fort en histoire ?

Etes vous un minimum cultivé ?

Etre Marseillais

Eurosport – Liste des 23 pour l’Euro 2008

Family Guy – Blue Harvest

Family Tree

Famous Christian Quotes

FB Addict – are you hooked on FB?

FFR Supporters

Fine Wines

Flirtable

Fortune Cookie

Free Gifts

Fresh Prince

Friend Hug

Friends For Sale!

Fun Cards!

Funnest Person Contest

Funny Cards

Fun Toys

Genius Test

Gifts Gallery

Good Morning

(Green) What fruit are you?

Growing Gifts

Guerre des gangs

Hatching Eggs

hello kitty

High School Trivia Test

Holiday Shoppe (Christmas Tree)

Hotness

Hot Potato

Hottest Person Contest

How gangsta are you?

How Indian Are You?

how smart are u?

How stupid are you?

How will you die?

Hug Me

Hug Me

Hugs

Hug Time

Iframer

iLike

Instant IQ Test

IQ Test

IQ Test (Advanced Level)

is cool

iSmile

Japanese Foods

Japanese Sweets

Jedi vs Sith

Jetman

Jeu de Séduction

JungleBook

Kisses

Kisses!

Kiss Me

Knighthood

Language Exchange

Likeness

Likeness UNRATED

(Lil) Green Patch

Local Picks

Love Friend

LX Champions League

LX College Football

LX World Cup Football

Mario Kart RPG

Meet New People

Mesmo TV

MeteoSun

MindJolt Games

Mood Ring

Most Creative People

Most Eligible Singles

Most Gorgeous Person Contest

Most Wanted Valentine!

Mountain Climber

Movies

My Angels

My Aquarium

My Boxofun

My Drunk Friends

MyFlirt

My Hebrew Name

My Heroes Ability

My Music

My Personality

My Questions

MY SEXY FRIENDS

MySpace

MySpace Link

NAB Smart Cookies

Name Analyzer

NBA Challenge

Nicknames

Nova Music

OneTrack

Optical Illusions Challenge

OUIFM

Owned!

Passe Ton BAC !

Personality

Photo Quizzes

Pieces of Flair

Pillow Fight

Pillow Fight!

Pink Ribbon

Portrait Chinois

Pour quelle boîte Corse es-tu fait(e) ?

Pour quelle époque êtiez-vous fait(e)?

Pour quelle ville êtes-vous fait(e) ?

Pour quelle voiture es-tu fait(e)?

PrayLive

Premier Football

Pro League Rugby

PuzzleBee Jigsaw Puzzles

Q??l Pa?f?? E? T? ?

Que fuyez-vous le plus ?

Quel alcoolique êtes vous?

Quel chroniqueur du grand journal êtes-vous?

Quel écrivain êtes-vous?

Quel est ce défaut chez toi qui fait craquer les hommes?

Quel est ton degré de connerie??

QuEl EsT tOn MeC IdEaL???

Quel est ton niveau d’anglais?

Quel est ton niveau sexuel ?

Quel Festival es-tu?

Quel genre de pute es-tu ?

Quel joueur de rugby etes vous?

Quel joueur du PSG 2007-2008 es-tu ?

Quelle citation êtes-vous?

Quelle couleur es-tu?

Quelle desperate housewife êtes-vous ?

Quelle icone glamour es-tu?

Quelle ligne de métro êtes vous?

Quelle mec te correspond ?

Quelle paire de chaussures de créateur êtes-vous ? (pour filles)

Quelle princesse de Walt Disney êtes vous?

Quelles Vacances VIP es tu?

Quel Maman est tu ?

Quel mannequin es-tu?

Quel méchant de Disney es-tu ?

Quel nageur connus es tu ?

Quel personnage de desperate housewives es-tu?

Quel personnage de FRIENDS es-tu?

Quel personnage de KAAMELOTT es-tu ?

Quel personnage de la Révolution êtes-vous ?

Quel personnage des BRONZES êtes-vous ?

quel qualité êtes-vous?

Quel séducteur (trice) etes-vous ?

Quel sorte d’enfant étais-tu?

Quel sous-vêtement êtes-vous?

quel star es tu ?

Que pensent les autres de toi en secret?

Que vas tu faire de ta vie ?

Quizzes

RAYMOND DEMISSION !!!

Rock Paper & Scissors

R U CUTE!

Save An Alien

Say Happy New Year!

Say-it-with-Flowers

SceneCaster

ScoreMe

Secret Admirer – CRUSH on ME (PERFECT MATCH)

Send Beer

Send Chocolate

Send Diamonds

Send Good Karma

Send HOTNESS

Send Love Hearts

Send Luck

Send Sunshine

Send Teddy Bears

Send Tiaras

Send Tux

Send Veggie Tales

Sexiest Person Contest

Sexy Friends

Sexy Pillow Fight

Sexy Poke!

Shots!

similaire

Six Degrees

Sketch Me

Skiers vs. Snowboarders

Slayers

Slide FunSpace

Smiles

Snowball Fight

Snowball Fight!

Social Profile

Sparkey

SpeedDate

SpeedDate

SpeedDate

SpeedDate

SpeedDate

SpeedDate

Sports Fan

Status Competition

Stickerz

Sticky!

StyleFeeder

Sudoku

Suomi-ilmiö

Superlatives

SuperPoke!

Super Slot Machines

Super Wall

Sweetest Person Contest

Tarot

Test ton niveau de culture

Texas HoldEm Poker

The Brain Game

The Legend of Zelda Fan

The Official 100 Question Geek Test

The Sex Compatibility Test

The Unofficial Desperate Housewife Quiz

The World’s Smallest Political Quiz

Top Friends

T.O.T. Effect

Tower Bloxx

Travel Brain

Traveler IQ Challenge

Trend Setter

True Match

Truth Box

TuneSocial

Twirl

Twist me!

U.S. Citizen Test

Vampires

Wanna Dance?

Water Globe Gifts

WC 2010 Euro Predictor

We’re Related

WereWolves

What Beer Are You?

What Color Is Your Heart?

What Does My Birthday Mean?

What Drink Are You?

What flower are you?

What football player are you?

What Is Your Ideal Job?

What is Your Secret Sexual Fantasy?

What is Your Supermodel Personality?

What kind of candy are you?

What Kind of Cat Would You Be?

What kind of hair best suits you? (for girls)

What Kind of Mom Will You Be?

What Lost Character Are You?

What Mythological Creature Are You?

What serial killer are you?

What song are you?

What’s Your Stripper Name?

Whats you true name? (Girls only)

What type of person do you attract?

What type of warrior are you?

When will you get married?

Which Disney Princess Are You?

Which Disney Song Describes Your Life Right Now?

Which Fashion Designer Would You Be?

Which Festival best suits you??

which F.R.I.E.N.D.S character are you???

Which Friends Character Are You?

Which Grey’s Anatomy Character Are You?

Which Hot Celeb Are You?

Which Rockstar Are You?

Which Sex and the City Character Are You?

Which Simpsons Character Are You?

Which WaterAid Country Are You?

Who Has The Biggest Brain?

Who is Watching You ?

Who’s Online

Who’s the Coolest Cat?

Will you KISS me?

Winnie the Pooh

Word Challenge

Word Twist

YES or NO?

Your Birthday

You’re a Hottie

You’re Cute

Your Sexyness

YouTube Video Box

Zombies

You too can escape this minor pantheon of horror – and you can do it without the tedium of blocking each application as it spams your Facebook newsfeed. As you may know, Greasmonkey enables the customization through JavaScript of the way a webpage displays. Auto-Block Facebook Apps is a Greasmonkey script that will block application invitations sent to you by Facebook contacts. After the facebook profile page is loaded, it finds all the applications that your friends have invited you to and blocks them. Whenever you need you can go to the Facebook applications privacy controller and unblock the ones that you find somewhat valuable. With applications spam out of the way, Facebook will remain the neat social watering hole that makes it valuable for interaction with non-geeks.

I just realized that Chrome does DNS prefectching and I would like to have that in a Firefox plugin. On fast links and older versions of Firefox, I used to enjoy Fasterfox – a plugin that among other speed optimizations prefetches link targets. Of course, that is a network intensive process that may not be suitable for general consumption. But proactive DNS resolving is a pretty harmless tweak that I would settle for – and the Fasterfox precedent shows that it is quite doable. Of course the paranoid prudent among us won’t like it, but that segment of the population knows how to turn off that sort of feature.

Techchrunch reported that “over the last few days a number of popular bloggers have complained, loudly, that it’s time to ditch Twitter and move to a decentralized version of the service that won’t go down every time usage spikes“. But I could not care less about that : I am not even a Twitter user. But I think there are good uses for micro-blogging and social instant messaging, so I want a free and open solution. That means decentralization in the classical Internetworking style.

Kudos to LinkedIn whose “Network Updates” feeds is available through an URL with a path long enough to actually be used as a basic shared secret, which is adequate security for protecting such a low value information. This lends itself perfectly to the sort of private aggregation I want.

As I was compiling the list of feeds I was going to aggregate, I tested each of them from my web server’s Z shell to check their reachability. When I pointer ELinks at my “Friend’s Status Updates” feed URL, here is what I got :

You are using an incompatible web browser.

Sorry, we're not cool enough to support your browser. Please keep it

real with one of the following browsers:

* Firefox

* Opera

* Safari

* Flock

Baaad Facebook ! This is so incredibly lame : not only is it an unnecessary annoyance, but it is also completely ineffective since I’ll just have to insert a wget download in my hourly Gregarius update script and tell wget to pretend being Firefox. Gregarius will then happily download the local copy through my web server. I just tested and wget –user-agent=”Mozilla” works just fine.

Even easier : I’ll modify my local Gregarius copy so that util.php at line 539 reads “$client->agent = Mozilla;” instead of “$client->agent = MAGPIE_USER_AGENT;” so that Magpie (the RSS import library for Gregarius) tells Snoopy (the HTTP client for Magpie) to use whatever Facebook wants to hear to deliver the goods.

I set up a link blog and a collaborative bookmarking site for our tiny geek community. My friends have initially been slightly confused by the conceptual similarities. So here are a few general guidelines to provide a clearer distinction of use cases.

Both tools are relevant for posting links with no significant value added by the poster. If there is value added by the poster in the way of analysis, context, story telling or anything else, a traditional blog entry is a better choice.

A social bookmarking tool must focus on resources that the user might want to come back to in the future, or that he thinks that his friends might be interested in one day. The accent is on easy recall through various means of discovery such as search, feed reading and folksonomic exploration.

By contrast, a link blog focuses on immediate sharing. It is the place to show off the spectacular, the anecdotic, the exceptional – novelty items that you want to share with your friends but whose future recall value for practical use might be low.

The motive for link blogging is not just altruistic : posting in a link blog is also a way to elicit reactions to the content you discovered. And that is why the community gathered around your link blog is important : you want to gather contributions from the people that matter to you. And if you have enough feedback, then there might just be enough new material to warrant more synthetic capitalization in a proper blog article.

As you can see, although the niches of social bookmarking and link blogging in knowledge management do overlap a little, they are definitely distinct and educating the users in extracting the highest value from them is worth the effort.

Open is everything – the rest is details. That is why we must take the best use cases of the closed social networking world and port them in the open. This is a lofty goal in all meaning of the adjective, but a surprisingly large number of potential basic components are available to cut the way short.

But part of the appeal of a social networking platform is how it empowers the user with control of what information he makes available, how it makes it available and to whom. So microformats are not sufficient : a permission management and access control system is necessary, and that requires an authentication mechanism. That naturally takes us to OpenID.

OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an “identity provider”. OpenID solves the authentication problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity.

Finally, the social graph is the support for applications that must interact with the user’s information wherever it is hosted. That is why Google’s OpenSocial specification proposes a common set of API for social applications across multiple websites.

So a few technologies for social networking do exist, and they seem able to provide building blocks for an open distributed social networking. The concept of open distributed social networking itself has been in people’s mind for a long time. But until now only large proprietary platforms have succeeded in seducing a critical mass of users. Thanks to them, there is now a large body of information about the best practices and use-cases. What is now necessary is to think about how those use-cases can be ported into a decentralized open environment.

Porting a closed single provider system into an open distributed environment while equaling or surpassing the quality of the user experience is a huge challenge. But social networking and digital identity management are such critical activities in people’s life that the momentum behind opening them may soon be as large as the one that led Internet pioneers to break down the walls between networks.